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There's a big argument on Right-wing Twitter between so-called "classical liberals" and the advocates of Christopher Rufo's aggressive tactics toward wokeness in higher education. I find myself in the middle but leaning more towards Rufo, which was reinforced by a recent Quillette article criticizing him. One paragraph in particular gets to the meat of the disagreement:
"Classical liberals" like to hit sentimental ideologues with cold hard facts. Advocates of the rosy theory of communism are confronted with the reality of communist states. Those with an overly sentimental view of the 1950s are hit with facts about how homes were smaller and most families had no more than a single car. Religious people are shown the evidence that their holy books were written by men, not Gods. But when people point out that their sentimental, idealized vision of "the free and open academy" is not working, they just circle back to the nobility of their vision and chastise people for deviating from it.
A true "classical liberal" would treat his ideas the same way he treats everyone else's, as hypotheses to be tested against reality. "Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities? As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one. Referring to DeSantis's takeover of the New College of Florida, Jonathan Haidt wrote that, "I am horrified that a governor has simply decided, on his own, to radically change a college. Even if this is legal, it is unethical, and it is a very bad precedent and omen for our country."[2] Haidt seems to object not to the specifics of what DeSantis did, but to the notion that any radical changes could be made to even a single college unless they're driven from within the academic caste. There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.
What is to be done? Critics of Rufo are right to note that in his zeal to, in his words, "recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere," he's often vague about what, exactly, those ideas are. The whole conservative movement doesn't know what it stands for. Rufo, who speaks about the importance of "faith" and hired a literal former porn star, is no exception. In my view, the solution is not erecting a franken-ideology of "American values" but doubling down on truly classical liberal /libertarian ideas.
That means austerity and the ultimate goal of privatization. The Quillette author is horrified by the vision of competing universities that market themselves to students on ideological grounds. To my mind, that's exactly what we should want. Just as our free market in food results in much obesity, a free market in higher education will result in many echo chambers. But just as not everyone chooses to overeat, not everyone will choose to attend an echo chamber. The kind of university people like Pinker dream about will be more likely to arise under such a regime than under the current regime of unaccountable institutions flooded with public money and asked nicely to respect academic freedom.
The "classical liberal" recoils in horror at the idea of woke students going to school in an openly woke echo chamber. They should be exposed to other points of view! The result is more often that "classical liberals" are exposed to woke student cancel culture mobs. "Classical liberals" should recognize that they're a minority. They will not win back control of academia from within and are ideologically opposed to outside aid. "Partition" is the solution most likely to give them what they want.
Nobel prices and fundamental research that changes the world a few decades later.
Research (and upstream activities of future research, like teaching and mentoring) are strong-link problems. Your end results only really depend on the very best that do it, the "not stellar" don't effect overall outcomes much. The problem is - as in most strong-link problems - that you don't know who the very best will be in advance. So having a lot of "not stellar" people have academic freedom (and have little to show for it 30 years later) is just the price of doing business.
So, what's the solution? Don't worry to much about it. Hire already successful mentees from the previous generation of strong links, punish outright fraud (Alzheimer research scandal, ect.) and leave them alone. And then don't trust any of them to much - if you're making policy decisions on their advice, you need a large meta study anyway. Usually, a strong link contrarian will appear.
What you shouldn't do is have a new crop of elected representative fight their way deep into the system every 4 years and topple everything. That actually affects outcomes.
I would argue that you are treating academia as a single thing when it is clearly made from a lot of different parts.
STEM ideally has both feet planted in reality, and is not very subject to ideological capture. Electrons don't have gender identities, the set of integers is not "Aryan". At the most, the prevailing ideology might force affirmative action on the faculty (thus increasing dead weight) and force the academics to pay lip service to the ideology.
These are likely the fields that you mean when you say
The more you stray from STEM, the more the heart of a field is subject to ideological capture, until you get to fields which are pure ideology, like Grievance Studies.
Now, I think that is it useful to keep the Humanities around and give them a bit of tenure, but that has to be justified in its own terms, simply packing them with STEM and saying "universities produce great benefits for society" does not seem very honest.
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I would also contest a bit that research (e.g. in fundamental physics) is genius constrained. The biggest discoveries in physics in the last two decades were the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both LIGO and LHC were massively collaborative efforts. The bulk of the work was done by PhD students who were smart, but not super-geniuses.
Now, you can argue that the puzzle pieces for a grand unified theory are there, and it would simply take a theoretical physicist with an IQ two SDs above the smartest person alive today to figure it out, but that is not a very good sales pitch to the larger society -- fund physics so that you get a 1 in 20 chance that we will find an equation which will make physicists really happy but may or may not have much practical use.
Yes, absolutely. And the only reason I'm doing that is because the current culture warriors rampaging through universities and science funding are doing the same.
I have a pretty radical solution for that: move all university STEM research (including all the grad students) to national labs. All undergrads stay at the current universities, where only "teaching professors" remain. Even in STEM, most undergrad classes don't benefit greatly from having an active researcher teaching them - but graduate level classes do.
I kind of disagree. There's a lot of small stuff happening behind the scenes at universities and then silently creeping into products all over the world. There's two relatively recent prices for lasers, those came from "classic-size" groups. Advances here (independent from those prizes) also still frequently make it from universities into (e.g. telecom) products. In biochem, CRISPR/CAS9 was an incredibly small team. In material science, I expect small university groups making big contributions to high-entropy metal alloys and to further improvement of semiconductors.
I don't see how you can avoid ideological capture by making research explicitly part of the government. That's just begging for ideological (specifically, political) capture.
Are the current national labs "part of the government" in any meaningful way?
In that they are literally a part of the US Department of Energy (a.k.a US Department of Energy and Nukes), yes.
I mean, sure. And the Marines are part of the DoD. Does that facilitate ideological capture, especially one that differs between administrations?
My personal experience in both cases says no, not really. The government can't significantly change the ideological makeup of either the national labs or the Marines, and both are ideologically not significantly different than the median of the population.
The government has already changed the ideological makeup of the military. Trump and Hegseth are currently attempting to change it in another way.
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